Minds, Machines and Metaphors
John Marshall · Social Studies of Science · 1977
It is well-known that between about 1945 and 1970 the mind (brain) of man was an electronic digital computer; indeed it is so well-known that one might suppose the issues thereby raised to be dead or worse, passe. And yet the topic continues, to be debated, amost daily, in the professional journals of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and many others. The debate proceeds not only in terms of rational argument and hard-won facts concerning the location of the central memory-ore in the temporal lobes (for example), but also by way of ideological and moral imperatives (located in frontal cortex, no doubt). Thus Stacey has recently claimed that i . . the mechanistic reductionists are really in the business of mystification. Far from developing an empirical psychological science, they are producing illusions . . . . Contrariwise, Clowes remarks that the anti-computer brigade have ' . . . . an extraordinarily impoverished concept of mechanism and an extremely superficial grasp of intelligent behaviour'2 only to meet Stacey's rejoinder that 'this argument derives from Clowes' and other mechanical reductionists' extraordinarily impoverished and mean concept of humanity . . . 3 It is far from my thoughts to wander into this particular metaphysical mine-field . despite the intrinsic fascination the subject holds. I shall accordingly retreat into history and claim that the mind has always been a machine (where by 'always' I mean since at least 430 BC). How then did this identification first come about?